One of Obama’s Earliest Supporters Defects

Artur Davis is an impressive guy. Here is how Howard Fineman of Newsweek described him in the course of a 2008 article hailing Barack Obama as “a symbol of a new generation of leadership.”

By 1990, Artur Davis had worked his way up from a childhood of poverty in Alabama to the top of his graduating class at Harvard College, and he was a hard man to impress. One day one at Harvard Law, he stopped by a classroom to hear a speech by a senior who was the new president of the Law Review. Davis wasn’t expecting much from the guy with a funny name. But he was surprised and riveted. “I still remember almost every word,” Davis told me last week. …

The men became friends. Seventeen years passed until, a year ago, Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama became the first congressman outside Illinois to endorse the presidential candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama. Two weeks ago Obama won the Alabama primary with Davis as state campaign chair.

Since then Davis, formerly a “rising star in the Democratic Party,” has become disillusioned. Politico reports that he is leaving the Democratic Party:

Former Alabama Rep. Artur Davis announced Tuesday that he’s cutting ties with the Democratic Party, and said that he’s considering a future bid for Congress as a Republican. …

Davis, who for a time had been considered a rising star in the Democratic Party, wrote a message on his website confirming that he is switching parties.

“[I]f I were to leave the sidelines, it would be as a member of the Republican Party that is fighting the drift in this country in a way that comes closest to my way of thinking: wearing a Democratic label no longer matches what I know about my country and its possibilities,” Davis wrote.

Davis wrote that he could no longer support the job-killing policies of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party:

In his message on Tuesday, Davis wrote: “On the specifics, I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured: frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country.”

Artur Davis explained his views and the reasons for his defection from the Democratic Party on the Neal Cavuto show. He is articulate, reasonable and obviously intelligent. His indictment of the Obama administration is damning because it is so measured.

Davis describes himself as center-right. He says there is no center-right in the Democratic Party, but there is in the GOP. This guy could go very far as a Republican.